


New York City, New York, USA (The Case of The One Which Remains)

by sevendeadlyfun



Category: Elementary (TV), World War Z - Max Brooks
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2013-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-04 03:43:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1076141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevendeadlyfun/pseuds/sevendeadlyfun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“We can’t let these stories die,” she says, rising out of the battered chair in a room that her editor might call an office if it weren’t so pathetically decrepit. The room is tiny, a breath of space in a still unrestored corner of New York. She paces the six steps across and back again. There is no money or time for flourishes in this brave new world.</i> There are hundreds of stories of the Z War. Joan refuses to let them go until they've been told.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New York City, New York, USA (The Case of The One Which Remains)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sinesofinsanity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinesofinsanity/gifts).



> I want to thank all my hardworking betas, vmarigoldabrams, specialrhino, and subjunctive for their feedback - they went above and beyond to help ensure the characters sounded authentic, immeasurably improving my story.

She can’t quite work out why they choose her. Because she’s made something of a name for herself as a writer, a doctor, a crack shot? Because she’s still alive and willing to do what they need done? Who knows why they choose her? She never asks.  She only knows the initial project takes two years to complete – two years of travel across a world now grown impossibly, bewilderingly large, her transcription a conduit for the collective grief and suffering of a world only a decade removed from the vast devastation of the Zombie War.

What she finally produces amounts to a worldwide after-action report - facts for generations of researchers yet unborn to chew over in unpublished theses, statistics for future wonks to analyze. But The Commission wants answers to unanswerable question: how does the world go to hell? She gives them the numbers and names they crave– the Redekar Plan; the uncountable millions dead at the Battle of Yonkers, of Chongquing; the sacrifice of General Raj-Singh which created the Indian safe zone.

 Buried inside the bomb craters and mass graves are opinions, feelings, and memories: the human side of the Z War. The Commission isn’t interested in this side of the war. These stories – survivors’ personal histories – weren’t her charge. Too intimate, they tell her. Not enough facts. Not enough figures.

But these stories need to be told. Now and not generations from now when the damaged bodies of the victors have given way to age and infirmity. She argues and she wins.

“We can’t let these stories die,” she says, rising out of the battered chair in a room that her editor might call an office if it weren’t so pathetically decrepit. The room is tiny, a breath of space in a still unrestored corner of New York. She paces the six steps across and back again. There is no money or time for flourishes in this brave new world.

“Then don’t. Write a book.” He stares at her across the thick wooden slab he uses for a desk. “You’ve still got all your notes _and_ the legal freedom to use them. Who’s stopping you from keeping these stories alive in the pages of your own fucking book?”

Part of recovery is structure – knowing what works and maintaining it going forward. The words are as true for a recovering world as for a recovering addict. So she writes in her own decrepit room – her old room from before the war. The brownstone survived the hordes and the evacuations and all the battles that followed. Survival is akin to salvation now and she is grateful for the salvation she finds inside their old home. It is as they left it, more or less, and she is unwilling to change it further. If the book is about a world lost, surely it’s also about finding what remains. This brownstone and its sparse contents are what remains of her life before.

When she’s done writing for the day, she wanders the mostly empty rooms in search of company that’s no longer available. After one very long night of work spent transcribing an interview session from a Midwestern rehab center for feral children, she finds a rusted padlock, broken and covered in the dust she has refused to disturb, and she sits quietly in the corner of the room holding the heavy weight tightly in her hand until dawn.

This project has taught her narrative invisibility – how to tell another’s story in their word, with their voice. Only the details remain, each of them an elegy for a fallen world, and they are all important. Even the unimportant ones are important and she records them all.  The words of the living, flowing from her well-used recorder, are an incantation, a hymn of sorrow that pulls in the restless shades of the dead.

They crowd around her as she works, the susurrus of their lost voices rising and falling, their insubstantial bodies shuffling to make space in the crowd; the lost mother, the long-gone sweetheart, the family dead of Z fever as the Panic hit and their friends fled. It’s why she never writes of her own journey out of New York. To ignore the insistent press of the millions dead would be selfish. Self-indulgent.

It doesn’t mean she’s forgotten.

She hopes Sherlock escaped. She looked for him during the evacuation. Looks for him still, if she’s honest. This story is just as much an elegy for their partnership as it is for the whole rest of the world. Her gift to him, really _: look at what I did with the skills you taught me._

 _I observed. I went out in to a world broken by war and brought back the truth, piece by piece. I have all the fragments in my hand and I will reassemble them until the whole is revealed._

He would call her sentimental. The words nonsense and claptrap would be part of his rebuttal – _foolishness, Watson. They are dead and far beyond whatever aid your tender sentiment would have you render._ She hears his voice in her ear. She hears all their voices.

_Get on it with it, Watson. Back to your transcriptions – how can you tell what is truth if you haven’t yet heard the whole of it?_

And so she types on. She tells the story of the outbreak, the Great Panic. As she listens and types, she sees faces: Mary Jo Miller, the mother who saved her children’s lives with her bare hands; Maria Zhuganova, her body worn from fighting and the many children she’d given in service to the new Holy Russian Empire; Jesika Hendricks, spearing frozen bodies in a never-ending effort to help rid the world of the Z plague for good.

 

They are not names on a page; not faceless facts or figures. She knows them. She’s traveled the world to listen to them, to share their stories, to give some kind of meaning to the horror. But every new story crashes against her, a relentless wave of suffering, of loss, and she can’t think what kind of meaning is found in the face of these horrors. All she can do is share the story of the war as she finds it. Those who come after will have to make their own meaning.

She knows what Sherlock would say. She knows because she has said it to herself. _Respice post te.  Hominem te esse memento. Memento mori, Watson._

So she keeps typing, a torrential downpour of words that echoes through the empty brownstone and fills the emptiness. She writes furiously – the story of the Z plague and its attendant horrors, the war and all that came with it, the faltering renewal that is even now a work in progress – and she bundles up the manuscript, carrying it with her as she leaves the brownstone for the last time.

It is history now. Truth, of a sort, though Sherlock would never call it that. It is the truth as she has found it, among the shards of a broken world, and it is her last case. There are no more mysteries left for her.

 


End file.
